Dhony Setiawan, M.Pd. Lecturer of Pamulang University
Due to the pandemic of Covid-19, many sectors in Indonesia change their way to run or even “survive”. One of the sectors, which is influenced by this pandemic situation, is education. Education, especially formal education, these days really rely on what we call “online learning”. Online learning offers some advantages for students to continue their education during this pandemic situation. First of all, online learning seems reliable for students to replace their usual learning process at school since the teachers and the students are still able to conduct the teaching and learning process without being worried to get exposed by Covid-19. Furthermore, since Covid-19 is seen as dangerous disease, and it spreads widely and easily through humans, government asks their people to lessen their mobility to avoid the deployment of Covid-19. That is why the teaching and learning process is now conducted through online system. It is to support the government program for people to “stay at home and lessen their mobility”. Besides that, online learning is also considered as the salvation for education sector to run the education process so that the students can still get what they deserve for their education. It is because of the demand of human resource and development which must be productive even in this pandemic situation. Therefore, education sector needs to improvise the learning process from offline to online learning.
However, there are many obstacles which appear during the process of teaching and learning through online. First, to conduct online learning, the students need to use a gadget, such as sufficient mobile phone at least, but sometimes they also need to use laptop, too. The problem is that not all parents can afford those kinds of gadgets to support their children learning process due to their financial problem. It becomes serious problem when the students cannot follow the learning process because they do not possess any gadgets to conduct it.
Then, another problem is with the internet connection, which is not always stable to conduct the learning process. When the students are having learning process through online, it is helpful if the internet connection is stable, but if it is not, then it will be an obstacle. The unstable internet connection can be experienced by either the students or the teacher. When it happened, the learning materials cannot be conveyed optimally, and then the learning objectives cannot be achieved. Moreover, the obstacle, which is still related to the internet connection, is about purchasing internet data. Actually, government already provides free internet data for the students and the teachers, but unfortunately, not all students and teachers obtain the internet data from the government. When they do not obtain it, they have to purchase the internet data so that they have to spent more cost to conduct the learning process. For parents who can afford it, it will not be problem, however, for the parents who cannot always afford it, it will obstruct the learning process.
The last but not the least is that, through online learning, the students do not know their teachers well since they only meet their teachers mostly through online media. It can influence the students’ behaviour, such as their attitude (being less respect to their teachers, undisciplined, etc.). It can be serious problem because in our education, especially in the curriculum, there are characteristic values, which must be built within the students. Therefore, it makes attitude important to be considered as the priority output besides academic achievement after conducting the learning process.
Thus, by seeing the elaboration above, it can be concluded that online learning can be advantageous or disadvantageous for either the students or the teachers. In this pandemic situation, online learning seems to be appropriate way to conduct the teaching and learning process, however, the implementation must be designed well to handle those kinds of problems which could possibly appear during the teaching and learning process. It is in order to achieve the learning objectives even though the education sector is facing the pandemic situation.
